Philadelphia, PA

Dear Van Bouwel,

I would tend to suppose it is because the history of political thought and the evaluation of that history counts to political science itself. Since political science tends to incorporate political philosophy, when philosophy engages in related themes, it amounts to more political philosophy.

Still, there are important methodological debates within political science, and you may want to ask why the philosophers do not interest themselves in these debates more frequently.

H.G. Callaway

Dear Dr. Callaway,

thank you for your answer. I have been asking around and someone recommended me a recent paper "Why is there no philosophy of political science" (2017) by Verbeek and McIntyre. I think the bottom line squares well with your observations, i.e. philosophical issues are often tackled by the political scientists themselves within their discipline. In philosophy, there is some relevant work done with respect to political science, but it is scattered. I agree that more attention from philosophers (I am mainly thinking about philosophers of social science here) would be welcome! So, establishing a field like 'philosophy of political science' could contribute to increase the dialogue and hopefully make some progress. I know what to do now :-).

Best regards,

Jeroen.

Much of what remains of a philosophy of political science is to be found at the level of the larger science political science is part of--the social science at large. Hence in most graduate programs any attempt to deal with such questions are placed in the frame of a course on the philosophy of the social sciences.

The thing you call "the philosophy of political science" was what the American practitioners of Behavioralism and the Positivist understood as Political Theory. And like what occurs in most of the other sciences, the partisans of this school thought little of the history of the past theories because they were clearly understood to be something that has been superseded by better and more true models. Thus there was an utter forgetting of the past and whatever wisdom that might have been still to be flushed out by the old practitioners. And any attempts to address the past models and approaches was seen to be the function of history not political science itself. Hence was why the history of political science was relegated to Departments of History while Behavioralism and Positivism reigned supreme.

You seem to be describing the sub-field of political theory, which is marginalized but does exist. David Ricci's The Tragedy of Political Science offers an american centric explanation for the marginalization.

There is hardly any stuff out there that explicitly uses the label of 'philosophy of political science', but, just like the other special (social) sciences, there is actually quite a bit of work that could/should be called 'philosophy of political science'. In that piece that Lee and I wrote, we gave some examples. There is also an excellent survey by Catherine Herfeld from Munich (it's in German), that gives many more examples.

Thank you, looking into it!